When Noel Gallagher posted a short message announcing the end of Oasis on the band’s official website on Aug 28, 2009, he did not hold back in saying who he thought was responsible.
“It’s with some sadness and great relief to tell you that I quit Oasis tonight,” he wrote. “People will write and say what they like but I simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer.”
On Tuesday morning, the band announced that it will finally reunite for a series of shows in the U.K. and Ireland, 15 years after the Gallagher brothers parted ways acrimoniously.
How did this iconic duo, bonded not just by music but family, fall out so deeply?
Oasis was one of most successful bands of its era, selling an estimated 75 million records and spearheading a revival of guitar music in Britain and elsewhere.
It also produced one the great rock partnerships: The swaggering bravado of Liam Gallagher and the almost-Beatles-level of song craft of his older brother, Noel.
The two sang in perfect harmony, but off-stage it was a different story. Noel’s farewell message in 2009 came after the brothers had a violent altercation minutes before they were due to go on stage at the Rock en Seine festival in Paris, part of a European tour.
In Noel’s version of events, the pair had clashed over Liam’s clothing label and the lead singer’s failure to play a festival (Noel claims he was hungover, Liam said he had laryngitis). Liam, his brother said at a press conference to promote a new album in 2011, threw a plum in anger before he “came back with a guitar and he started wielding it like an axe.”
The elder Gallagher was regretful about the band’s demise: “Liam always said he would bring down Armageddon in the end, that’s the way he kind of likes things to be. And there you go. And it’s a shame, because I was comfortable in that band,” he said at the press conference.
The cracks in the relationship were visible from the very early days.
On the band’s first American tour in 1994, Liam reportedly changed the lyrics to songs in an attempt to annoy Noel. And Noel briefly quit the tour and the band, before rejoining.
The peace did not last: On Sept. 29, the band played a disastrous drug-fueled gig at LA’s Whiskey A Go Go, complete with faltering performances, threats from and aimed toward the crowd and a thrown tambourine.
In 1995, a recording of an interview with the two brothers from the previous year was leaked and widely shared when another record label released it as a single. It featured the pair angrily bickering and taunting each other with a long string of creatively foul-mouthed insults.
The Gallaghers were sparring over a recent scandal in which four members of the band — Noel was not involved — were arrested and deported from the Netherlands for a drunken brawl on an overnight ferry from the U.K.
During the recording of the band’s second album, “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?” Liam invited a group of people he’d been out drinking with at a local pub to the recording studio in rural Wales. Noel was so annoyed he hit his brother with a wooden cricket bat, an incident detailed by Oasis biographer Paolo Hewitt. The bat was sold at auction for an unknown fee.
Noel has since described this as possibly the pair’s biggest fight, but it was not their last. During downtime following a gig cancellation in Barcelona, Spain, in 2000, the pair came to blows, leaving Liam with a split lip. Noel left the band for the second time, and the band completed the tour without him.
A reunion has always looked unlikely, given the strength of animosity between the two, who have, over 15 years, mentioned each other less than favorably in interviews and on social media. In an interview with Q magazine in 2009, Noel called Liam “the angriest man you’ll ever meet.”
“He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup,” Noel added.
Liam replied on Twitter, posting a video of him eating soup with a fork.
For his part, Liam referred to Noel Gallagher’s High-Flying Birds, his band since 2010, as the “High-Flying Turds.” The younger Gallagher has also at various points, without explanation, referred to the elder as a “potato.”
But thawing of such icy relations appeared to be on the way when Liam dedicated an Oasis song, “Half the World Away” to Noel during his headline set at Reading Festival, in southern England, on Sunday night.
And Noel paid his younger brother some compliments in an interview last week, praising his rasping vocals. “It’s the delivery or the tone of his voice and the attitude,” he said. He compared Liam’s voice to “10 shots of tequila on a Friday night” whereas his own was more like “half a Guinness on a Tuesday.”
When Oasis reunites for a series of reunion gigs next year, there is every chance the quality of the songwriting and performances will shine through — but perhaps an older, wiser version of the band will be less likely to self-destruct in public.